Elevate 2017

Summary Given that this is the first conference that Appeon had hosted, I thought it went extremely well. There were a few areas for improvement, which I'll address at the end of this article. Attendance was good and diverse. It seemed like there were a significant number of people attending from outside of the United States. (Appeon later indicated that 24% of the attendees were from outside North America, 4% from Asia, and 10% each from Europe and Latin America). There was a lot of energy and excitement on the attendees’ part, and the sessions overall appeared to have been high quality and well attended. The facilities were great, if a bit small, and the services provided by Appeon to facilitate travel between the downtown hotels and the conference location were a great touch. If you didn't attend this year I would highly recommend it next year, particularly given we should have some exciting new 2018 features to see next year.

Facility The conference was held Sept 25th through 27th at the Harris Conference Center in Charlotte, NC. The facility is located on the campus of the Central Piedmont Community College, just a few miles from the Charlotte Douglas International airport. Most of the attendees stayed at the Holiday Inn in downtown Charlotte or other downtown hotels. Appeon provide shuttle busses that ran every 30 minutes between the Holiday Inn and the conference center at the beginning and end of each day of the conference. The keynote, lunches and some sessions were held in the Full Conference Hall. Other sessions were run simultaneously in the Ash, Birch, Cypress and Maple conference rooms.

Registration I'm used to conferences that allow registration the day before the conference begins. Such was not the case here. Instead registration opened at 8:00 the first day of the conference and the keynote didn't begin until 9:30, but the registration went smoothly.

Breakfasts During registration and each morning the next two days breakfast was offered. It was the standard carbs and fruit offering typical for such events. Doesn't quite fit my diet so I made other arrangements, but most other attendees seemed content.

Keynote

Armeen Mazda started the opening keynote. He discussed "what we have accomplished".

PowerBuilder 2017 delivered, which offers

Core features

Easy migration

More stable

Appeon-U

Free training

Can be completed in 1 week

Based on the old fast track to PowerBuilder Course

Community delivered

Appeon MVP

Real tech Q&A

How to videos and articles

CodeXchange

Elevate 2017

60 hours of tech sessions

Special product previews for

PowerBuilder 2017 R2

PowerBuilder 2018

Impressive attendees

Georg Brodbeck spoke next, a customer success story.

Company has 80 employees, 45 of which are PB developers

Their main product is an ERP system

Bigger teams require different development processes

Continuously integrated

What they need to see from future versions of PowerBuilder

Address old fashioned IDE and few new features

Support for new operating systems

Chris Pollach spoke next.

Release plan and schedule

Revision approach

R2 12/31

R3. 6/2018

Restful app

Source control integration with TFS

2018. 12/2018

C# development

C# web API

64-bit application enhancements, UI modernization

Support mechanism

Community

Standard

Paid

EBF vs MR vs Revisions

MRs once a quarter

MR1 09/2017

LTS support

Supported for 3 to 5 years

1 year notice before dropping support

2017 R2 will be first LTS version

R2 highlights

TLS 1.2

Consumption of REST/JSON

Git and SVN

No longer need separate directory for each PBL

Native PDFs enhancements

PDF A1 and A3

Improve font and graphics rendering

More page sizes

PostgreSQL support

Improve standalone compiler

More options from project object

PB 2018

REST web APIs and NVO.NET (uses Roslyn within the PB IDE)

Chris then demoed some of the C# development capabilities they were planning for 2018.

Mike Croyle of CBIZ spoke next, another customer success story.

Mid 90’s Client/Server

2003 PB/EAServer

2009 PB WebForms

2012 Appeon Web

Armeen then spoke again on Appeon 2018 and beyond.

.NET stack

Deploy anywhere

N-tier (cloud)

Leverage existing investments

2018-2019 focus

.NET desktop cloud apps

R3

JSON DataWindow

TFS integration

2018

C# server projects

PB native IDE enhancements

2019

Desktop cloud target

UI framework

Cloud app benefits

Simplified deployment

Code reuse and extensible (more code to server)

Integration ready (web APIs)

.NET interoperability

BUT your app has to be fully partitioned

Rapidly evolving existing apps

PowerServer Web add-on

~80% automated conversion

Hybrid n-tier

JSON DW

C# web APIs

Optimize UI

Optimize existing

Rebuild UI layer

Filiberto Sosa of Sizes and Colors then spoke, another customer success story.

21 Years ago POS system

Grew to full ERP system

Now handles 30% of Mexicoʼs shoe sales

Web and mobile clients

6 Appeon Web servers handling 5,000 concurrent users

4 PB developers

Keynote Takeaways

Release schedule - I think most attendees were quite pleased to see an even higher-paced release schedule (multiple minor releases per year with incremental new features). It means new features end up in our hands sooner rather than waiting for next major release.

C# development - Here I think most of the attendees left somewhat undecided about this particular feature. It appears the purpose of the enhancement has many purposes:

Allow developers who are not familiar with PowerBuilder but know C# to use PowerBuilder

Assist in the migration of PowerBuilder apps to n-tier

Consumption of REST/JSON - I think many attendees were pleased with this feature. PowerBuilder has fallen far behind the curve in web services support. Personally, I'd like to see improvements in SOAP as well, but REST seems to be where the most growth and demand is in web services support.

Git and SVN - I know some customers are excited to see this coming, particularly me. My company moved to SVN some time ago. However, the vendor that provided the bridge product that we use to get PowerBuilder to talk to SVN apparently ceased development about 5 years ago. In addition, the open source PowerBuilder projects I support have moved to GitHub, making Git integration important. I'm currently using another bridge product, but it has a number of limitations.

PostgreSQL support - Another enhancement I'm particularly interested in. The developer edition of SQL Anywhere is no longer provided with the product. Support for PostgreSQL provides a low (no) cost for initial development work. In addition, unlike SQL Anywhere, support for PostgreSQL allows for low (no) cost production deployment.

Improved standalone compiler - Yet another one I'm particularly interested in. I normally compile my applications as a small executable (basically just the application object) from the first PBL and PBDs for the remaining PBLs. That method of compilation isn't supported by the current standalone compiler.

New UI framework - Many of the attendees were excited about this enhancement, but a few expressed some concern about the timing of its introduction. That is, some attendees were more interested in seeing this feature introduced sooner rather than some of the other proposed features. Others thought that existing methods of improving the UI of PowerBuilder applications were adequate for the immediate future and were willing to wait for that and have the other features first.

Conference App During the keynote they announced the availability of a mobile application (based of course on PowerBuilder/Appeon) for accessing the conference schedule.

The app showed the time and duration of the sessions, where they were located, and gave a synopsis of them. There were also printed session lists posted throughout the conference area. The rooms weren't very far apart and there was an electronic notice outside each room with the session name so it was relatively easy to find them.

Lunch

The lunches had a local flair to them, as a result of which I ate more macaroni and cheese in the three days of the conference than I have in the last three years!

Sessions I had three sessions I presented on Monday afternoon:

Migrating to PowerBuilder 2017

Migrating to 64-bit

Calling advanced web services from PowerBuilder using a COM Callable Wrapper (CCW) client

Quite a number of the sessions became standing room only, such as this presentation by Ronnie Po on Tuesday:

Breaks Snacks and soft drinks and water were provided in mid-mornings and mid-afternoons.

Special Event The special event was held Monday evening at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. It's normally only open from 10 AM to 6 PM, so we had it for a private event.

Food (hamburgers or bratwurst with sauerkraut) were provided as well as an open bar.

The main attractions were simulators for pit crews and races. Many of the attendees seemed to having great deal of fun squaring off against their fellow attendees.

Tuesday I had four sessions I was presenting on Tuesday:

Preparing applications for the Windows App Store

Accessing any data from PowerBuilder through OData

Using .NET Visual controls from PowerBuilder

Continuous Integration with PowerBuilder

Because of my own schedule I wasn't able to attend any other sessions.

Wednesday I had two sessions I was presenting on Wednesday:

Using .NET non-visual assemblies from PowerBuilder

Calling advanced web services from PowerBuilder using a proxy web service

That allowed me to attend the only session by another presenter I was able to get to the entire conference. On Wednesday afternoon John Hnat of Foundation Software did an "ISV Discussion on PowerBuilder's Roadmap".

His discussion points were:

Are you staying client/server or moving to the web

Are you doing any new development

Where are you finding / training new developers

What features do you want to see in PowerBuilder

Are you satisfied with the proposed direction of PB

Open mic

Thoughts for next year Location

A different location. With the NCPBUG meetings in Charlotte in 2014 and 2015 and Elevate in Charlotte in 2017 we’ve seen a lot of Charlotte. I’m ready for a change, as long as it’s not Las Vegas.

Sessions

Do some pre-planning to ensure that sessions aren’t overcrowded. I’d suggest allowing for session selection during online registration so they can get some feel for the size of room needed for each session and which perhaps should be repeated.

Schedule specific break times and provide coffee as well as the soda and snacks during the breaks.

Build in a bit of overlap between sessions in the same room (e.g., 15 minutes) so that the incoming presenter has time to set up.

Modify the conference app for next year so that it includes the name of the speaker for each session.

If printed session lists are going to be posted, make sure they include the room number.

Workshops

For hands-on workshops, consider charging a small fee and using that money to offset the cost of doing the workshop via Amazon Workspaces or something similar. The problem with hands-on workshops where virtual machines are provided on USB sticks is that you can end up spending most of the workshop trying to get the environment set up correctly. With Amazon Workspaces the instructor can get the student machines all configured in advance. The students then use remote desktop to access the machines during the class and off hours. I participated in a hands-on workshop like that back in the SAP TechEd days and it allowed us to get pretty much straight to the training with only a small time needed for setting up the environment.